He did not stop to wonder how Lord Newhaven had become aware of his own dishonor, or at the strange weapon with which he had avenged himself.  He went over every detail of his encounter with him in the study.  His hand had been forced.  He had been thrust into a vile position.  He ought to have refused to draw.  He did not agree to draw.  Nevertheless, he had drawn.  And Hugh knew that, if it had to be done again, he should again have been compelled to draw by the iron will before which his was as straw.  He could not have met the scorn of those terrible half-closed eyes if he had refused.

“There was no help for it,” said Hugh, half aloud.  And yet to die by his own hand within five months!  It was incredible.  It was preposterous.

“I never agreed to it,” he said, passionately.

Nevertheless, he had drawn.  The remembrance ever returned to lay its cold hand upon his heart, and with it came the grim conviction that if Lord Newhaven had drawn the short lighter he would have carried out the agreement to the letter.  Whether it was extravagant, unchristian, whatever might have been truly said of that unholy compact, Lord Newhaven would have stood by it.

“I suppose I must stand by it, too,” said Hugh to himself, the cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.  “I suppose I am bound in honor to stand by it, too.”

He suffered his mind to regard the alternative.

To wrong a man as deeply as he had wronged Lord Newhaven; to tacitly accept.  That was where his mistake had been.  Another man, that mahogany-faced fellow with the colonial accent, would have refused to draw, and would have knocked Lord Newhaven down and half killed him, or would have been knocked down and half killed by him.  But to tacitly accept a means by which the injured man risked his life to avenge his honor, and then afterwards to shirk the fate which a perfectly even chance had thrown upon him instead of on his antagonist!  It was too mean, too despicable.  Hugh’s pale cheek burned.

“I am bound,” he said slowly to himself over and over again.  There was no way of escape.

Yesterday evening, with some intuition of coming peril, he had said, “I will get out.”  The way of retreat had been open behind him.  Now, by one slight movement, he was cut off from it forever.

“I can’t get out,” said the starling, the feathers on its breast worn away with beating against the bars.

“I can’t get out,” said Hugh, coming for the first time in contact with the bars which he was to know so well—­the bars of the prison that he had made with his own hands.

He looked into the future with blank eyes.  He had no future now.  He stared vacantly in front of him like a man who looks through his window at the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has met his eye every morning of his life and finds it—­gone.  It was incredible.  He turned giddy.  His reeling mind, shrinking back from the abyss, struck against a fixed point, and, clutching it, came violently to a stand-still.